(FORTUNE Magazine) – America's moneylenders, long under regulatory pressure because they had made so many preposterous loans, are coming under pressure to make more of them. Just as you knew it would, the Clinton Administration has begun to expand and muscle-up the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) and the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA); both represent efforts to increase the volume of inner- city loans. This legislation has several obvious appeals for the Clintonites. First, their main priority nowadays is seeing if it is possible to go four days in a row without screwing up, and they cannily sense that one way to extend the streak is to get on-stage telling bankers they gotta make more loans to poor people. Second, it has to be fun watching the bankers of America blathering on the Hill about how deep down inside they love the laws' requirements. Finally, the costs of both laws are borne by the private sector -- by banks making loans they would prefer not to make and then spending gazillions to prove they are in compliance with the law. The American Banker recently reported that regulatory paperwork collected pursuant to enforcement of HMDA would create a pile as tall as the Washington Monument. To be sure, this publication is believed to be pro-banker. Do bankers really claim to love the two laws? Hey, what are community development officers for? Catherine Bessant, who is in this line of work with North Carolina-based NationsBank, recently told National Mortgage News that her institution ''advocates a tougher, more effective CRA because there is an enormous gap between the intent of the law and what it actually does.'' Bankers say they not only welcome federal pressure to lend in the inner cities but also yearn to get closer to community activists who will then create even more pressure on them. This inside-out logic is elaborated in a recent report in the American Banker, which earnestly quotes Mark Willis, president of Chase Manhattan's community development subsidiary, on the importance of getting together with the community characters. ''If we don't do this together,'' Mark says, ''it's going to take a long time to solve the problem.'' Also laboring to develop this noble new PR package is American Bankers Association President William Brandon, who posits that what the industry needs now is a ''summit'' where it will solve the inner-city problems in conjunction with the community folks and the friendly federal government. Now you know what presidents of the ABA are for. The Administration's current brainstorms include an effort to extend the reach of CRA to nonbank institutions -- money market funds, for example, and consumer finance companies. Frank N. Newman, Under Secretary of the Treasury for Domestic Finance, says it is time to figure out the ''community responsibilities'' of the nonbank lenders. Since money market funds do not ordinarily go around making loans to people, the Treasury is still a bit unclear about how they would reach out to poor people. One idea being floated is to make the funds invest in local community development banks. In case you forgot, the Clintonites also have plans for the feds to invest in these local institutions (as promised in Bill's campaign last year). It figures to be an exciting year in the world of banking, not to mention the world of PR.